We recently had a chance to attend a live music performance with friends. It was all
wonderful, but one of the songs was a duet in which the male singer was supposed to
be apart from his female partner for the first part of the song, coming out into the
open only later in the piece. There was brief joking between the conductor and the
male singer, and then the singer put a hand on the fabric-wrapped tent pole as if
he was hidden behind a tree. We all laughed because he was perfectly visible, but he
managed to make the situation work with his voice, acting skills and his body
movements as he finally came out from behind the tree that wasn't really there at
all. We were with him. We were on his side.

When we tell stories, we sometimes elect to omit certain details about a character
until later in a story. Sometimes it works better to keep certain details in the
forefront of the reader's mind. At other times, revealing those details in a sudden
moment well into a story can enforce sympathy/empathy. It can even give the reader
more reason to dislike a character. We might not let the character give us this
information, but instead let other characters' dialogue or the action itself spell
out the added details.

In the case of our singer, we had to allow him his moment of breaking character
in order to give us enough information to understand his placement in the scene
and to pull us a bit closer into suspension of disbelief so that we could go on
to enjoy the rest of the performance. It's similar to the sort of thing an actor
does when they turn abruptly from their placement in a scene and proceed to speak
directly to a live audience or a camera (or twirl a mustache to elicit boos,
in the case of a villain in a melodrame). It often startles us, but it's also very
effective in taking us to new heights in terms of accepting the truths behind the
story.